bug#81406: 31.0.90; rotate-windows loses window balance when window-combination-resize is t

Stéphane Marks [07/Aug  4:50pm +02] wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 7, 2026 at 10:47 AM Pranshu <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> > I disagree, dedicated windows are windows that are dedicated to one
>> > buffer, but that dosn't mean you can do stuff like split them or even
>> > change their size.  rotate-windows is an exception, it seems like it's
>> > moving the buffers around, but actually it's destroying and recreating
>> > the window tree from scratch, so it gives the wrong impressoin.  The
>> > other window-x don't have this issue, they're pretty clear about that
>> > they do. Since dedicated windows are splittable, there's no reason why
>> > they shouldn't be transposable etc.
>>
>> For a better analogy: Imagine a window is a person, and a buffer is
>> the person's soul (etc their personality and memories).  A dedicated
>> window is a person whose body is exclusive to their soul.  On the
>> outside, rotate-windows looks like it swaps people's souls and bodys
>> but the people stand exactly where they were, just their souls
>> changed.  But in reality, rotate-windows changes the person's body and
>> soul and moves them around to make it look like souls were swapped.
>> The other window commmands for example flip windows, simply relocates
>> people in predicatable way to have the people standing northmost go to
>> the southmost point.
>>
>
> I've always taken a window dedicated to its buffer to be precisely that and
> nothing more; i.e., no expectations of the window being fixed in space.  I
> have only two dedicated windows I use daily and in a tab-bar tab that is
> "locked" from being closed (that contribution coming in Emacs 32 along with
> several other tab-bar improvements).

Your positions here are perfectly reasonable, but so is the view that
dedicated windows don't move.  That's why I think we should default to
the latter (the commands refusing to operate) but make it easy for users
to opt-in to the behaviour you describe.

-- 
Sean Whitton